frequently asked questions

the purpose of boyhood is a creative outlet for alex hurley to express himself through the auditory medium. alex has been obsessed with music for his entire life and is always in the process of making new tunes, so check back frequently for teasers, covers, and release dates of new singles and potentially, albums.

i envision a lot of things for the future of boyhood. of course i want to win a grammy and be one of the top artists but that's a level of fame i've never heard be fun anymore. i like the idea of having a niche audience that loves what i do. i also envision a clothing brand (i guess also considered as merchandise) but i really want to make clothes as well, i want to make a lot of films for my music, i want to reach every genre ever, i want to perform at a runway, i want to perform at camp flog gnaw, i want to perform at the fox theater in oakland, i have so many dreams and i think i can get a lot of them to happen.

it can either be a long story or a short story, so i'll tell both.

long story is that i'm a huge michael jackson fan, and i loved all those lesser known songs, and i also loved diving into his life and what made him him. i learned that he had a really challenging childhood after hearing his song "Childhood", and i really loved it, it was super touching to me. and i also love reminiscing on the past. i don't know when it was, but sometime about a year ago i was scrolling on tiktok and saw that trend of girls posting things like "____ is girlhood" and like "girlhood is blah blah blah" and i was like "there are like zero boyhood posts. and then i was like... boyhood... that's kinda hard. so that's when i started writing it in place of "dakota" in my google docs and that's when the name stuck. it wasn't supposed to be my new artist name, it was supposed to be like a side project where i got more personal in my songs, but i loved the name so much i stopped releasing under "dakota" and decided i'd be boyhood forever.

short story is i liked the album titled "Boyhood" by Birth Day that you can hear here and kept seeing it when i went through my spotify saved and was like "that's actually hard as hell". that was the catalyst for the name change. 

my last answer before "birdhouse" was "friend", but that song is lowkey a deep cut now. i think the definitive Boyhood song now is "so proud". it was the one people started taking me seriously after, and i still think it's one of my best ones.

all pictures and videos you see me use have been taken by sal larkins or me. if i'm in the video, it was probably taken by sal, if i'm not, it was probably taken by me.

you can find him at @sal.larkins.media on instagram!!!

i have been singing forever but never really had the musician dream until middle school. i learned about the rise to fame that odd future had and how cool they were and i was like "i wanna be them so bad" so my first ever project i put out titled "six" was a rap album that had a story similar to the "Wolf" trilogy. that is why it isn't on streaming services anymore. not just "six", because i didn't stop there. i also made a trilogy, and in my discography i call it the "saint hxrley trilogy" and if you ever want to hear it, you can't!

the name "Boyhood" means the childhood of a boy, and how precious that is. i love looking back on the pictures from my 3ds and the silly audio recordings i made, and my drum videos from elementary school, and just the childhood wonder and whimsy i had, and how i wanted to make my brother's childhood the most fun and fulfilling thing in the world. i want him to have all those good memories too. i explained why i chose it in a different question, but it defines my art by having experiences from my life and how it is to be a boy in the 21st century (and be an awesome one like a really cool guy).

literally everything, any social interaction, current events, also just like video games and how i feel about life, whatever is in my head when i sit down to write or sometimes i hear stuff outside and i write down a line in my notes app then i make something about that, but i used to write some bs i've grown a lot. 

my songwriting process as of late has consisted of fooling around on my guitar or a piano and kinda just throwing words and melodies at the wall until something sticks. i have a long list of notes that are just words i like together (that's how some lines like "take a few shots, let em burn in your chest" started) and see if they fit in a song. i try to write as much as possible so there's more possible good songs rather than just never writing a song at all.